Seek the important and dismiss the trivial.
I
Andrei spends hours typesetting his homework and research papers because he likes the way the final product looks and believes the clean, high-quality design reflects well on him as a student and researcher. But every hour spent in his LaTeX environment is an hour taken away from working on research that would legitimately improve his prestige and rank. Hamming would be disappointed.
Andrei should half-ass his homework and papers with everything he's got and move onto actual research.
II
Pierre is an entry-level engineer who makes up for lack of experience with vigor. In an effort to meaningfully contribute to his group, he takes the low hanging fruit to do something while the big boys crank through the scarier projects. The time these take is substantially more than the value they provide.
Pierre should dive deep to figure out either how to contribute to the impactful projects or conceive of an impactful project of his own.
III
Natasha is a stay-at-home mother who runs the household from a child-food-shelter perspective. While she always has a meal ready to go when her husband gets home, her cooking is subpar and everyone knows it. She makes up for this by ensuring the house is extra clean (it's already pretty clean), the kids are extra taken care of (they already have few, if any, complaints), and she is extra kind and caring to all (she already is a very kind woman).
Natasha should work on improving her cooking skills to increase her family's dinnertime pleasure.
IV
Nikolai is an athlete competing in general fitness events that involve a lot of running, something he isn't good at due to lack of interest and his muscular build. He continues to prioritize strength and capacity work over running—two things he is already above average at—yet wonders why he places so poorly.
Nikolai should put his strength and capacity training on maintenance mode and focus on improving his running.
V
Marya, a native Russian speaker, is learning English. Her curriculum takes a multi-faceted approach of listening, writing, reading, and speaking. She finds reading the easiest and often chooses to read native English text over developing other skills. She is proud of her reading ability after a few months, but is grossly unable to hold a conversation with a fluent English speaker due to her heavy accent and poor listening ability.
Marya should focus heavily on improving her speech and listening skills by talking with fluent English speakers on a regular basis.
There are multiple themes at play in these examples.
The order of importance can easily be mixed when personal preferences come into play. This makes objective measurement more important. Nikolai loves his barbell, but his running performance proves he probably loves it a bit too much at the expense of actions that could greatly benefit overall results.
People like things they're good at and dislike things they're bad at. This is the ego playing puppet master over one's time and effort. Vicious cycles of progression/no progression (or even regression) are easy to get into without realizing what's happened, how long it's been, and how far each skill has gone in their separate directions.
Practicing I-feel-good-doing-this skills is still important for motivational reasons. Forcing practice of I-do-not-feel-good-doing-this skills is a recipe for burnout, and everything burns out with it, including the IFGDT skills.
Soares addresses this well in his Half-assing it with everything you've got:
Your preferences are not "move rightward on the quality line." Your preferences are to hit the quality target with minimum effort.
As skills improve, the effort and time needed to make the same improvement grows exponentially. However, said effort and time can easily be invested in places where the curve is much closer to linear. An additional benefit of this is the quick, generally-positive feedback loop that forms and encourages even more practice in said skill.
Andrei's quality target should be focused on the research itself and less the presentation of it.
Some activities feel like they're doing something, but in reality aren't. Altman addresses this well in his Value is created by doing:
A lot of stuff feels like work—commenting on HN, tweeting, reading about other companies’ funding rounds, grabbing coffee, etc [1]—is not actually work. (If you count that as work, think really hard about the value you’re creating in your job.)
Another example of not-quite-work is every night in San Francisco, there are dinner parties where people get together and talk about the future. It’s always fun and usually not very contentious—most people agree we need to go to space, for example. But at the end of it, everyone goes home and works on something else.
All (valuable) work is busy, but not all busy (work) is (valuable) work. These two are often conflated in organizations, giving inexperienced individuals the false notion that busy equals valuable. This must stop. Valuable work should be determined based on how well it furthers the goal—whether directly or indirectly—not how much time it takes.
The next step in a progression is often clear. Sometimes data may be required to prove it or compare it to an arguable second, but in the end, there are only a handful of candidates. This can be a harsh pill to swallow. Realizing the hard path through the dark forest of pain, discomfort, and gloom is the most important path is both humbling and scary, two emotions we are keen to run away from towards the lush meadow of comfort and pleasure.
Avoid the meadow because no growth happens there; inhabitants grow complacent in their environment and with themselves. Seek the forest because a changed person—one who's wiser, smarter, and better—will come out the other side.